Great resignation fuelled by digital disappointment

Nexthink has released Digital Sabotage & The Great Resignation, a new report on the state of digital employee experience and its implications on everything from productivity, talent referrals, employee retention and customer satisfaction to an organization’s bottom line. According to the report findings unreliable IT service and equipment (in-office or remote) was the third most influential factor for employee turnover or burnout, behind poor salary and an unhealthy work culture. Almost 20 percent of all respondents would opt to leave their job because of a poor IT experience. 

A driver of poor DEX can unfortunately be self-created in some cases, a startling 82 percent of senior ITDMs believe that employees at their organization don’t realize that they are often the source of their own digital frustrations. The study shows that employees downplay when self-reporting certain activities like saving personal files to work devices, ignoring IT/security messages on screens until they’re forced to act and using personal public cloud storage for work documents, meanwhile IT knows employees are participating in these “self-sabotaging behaviors.”

“The ongoing pandemic and resulting remote work has brought employee experience issues to the forefront, specifically the role that IT plays in either assisting or hindering that experience as digital environments are the connective thread for enterprises,” says Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Officer of Nexthink. “What’s concerning is that only 32 percent of employees were aware their company even had a dedicated digital employee experience resource within IT. Combined with employees stating they would leave their job because of a poor IT experience, in this time of the Great Resignation, businesses can’t risk this.”

That’s not all - the report highlights how IT mishaps not only impact employee productivity, but can strain customer relationships, 68 percent of senior ITDMs report at least one IT issue per week and 54 percent of senior IT decision makers admit that IT failures have often or sometimes led to embarrassing situations with customers and business partners at their organization.

Additional key findings from this study include:

• Employees often unintentionally sabotage their own productivity by trying to fix IT problems themselves

o More than half of respondents try rebooting and asking colleagues if they are also having issues, while only 15 percent report contacting the IT help desk for help.

• While organizations are investing in DEX many employees aren’t clear on who is responsible for it

o Only 30% of employees believe that IT is involved in creating a better DEX, compared to 64% of ITDMs who know it is their team responsible for this.

• IT plays a major role in whether or not employees will help with recruiting efforts

o 42% of employees say that the quality of the digital workplace influences their willingness to recommend their organization to job seekers, and 82% of IT decision makers agree.